Dollar Stores: Top Link in the Sweatshop Chain
by Kent Paterson, Special to CorpWatchOctober 6th, 2010A growing group of chain-store corporations that cater to America's poor with cheap goods are classifying workers as managers. By categorizing employees as salaried managers these dollar stores avoid paying overtime wages that the Fair Labor Standards Act mandates for hourly workers.

Global Horizons Indicted for Human Traffickingby Pratap Chatterjee, Special to CorpWatchSeptember 15th, 2010Mordechai Orian, president of Global Horizons, a Los Angeles-based labor recruiter, was indicted by the U.S. Department of Justice for "engaging in a conspiracy to commit forced labor and document servitude" of some 400 Thai citizens who were brought to work on farms in the U.S.

Billion Dollar Audit Missed by Pentagon Watchdogby Pratap Chatterjee, Special to CorpWatchAugust 30th, 2010Military auditors failed to complete an audit of the business systems of Ohio-based Mission Essential Personnel even though it had billed for $1 billion worth of work over the last four years, largely done in Afghanistan.

Gulf Dispersants: BP and Nalco Play Toxic Rouletteby Terry J. Allen, Special to CorpWatchJuly 19th, 2010BP has dumped almost two million gallons of dispersants from Nalco in the Gulf of Mexico that is disguising the extent of the Deepwater spill and the inability of existing technology to mitigate the disaster. Even if BP eventually staunches the hemorrhage of oil, devastating toxins will linger for decades.

U.S. Congressional Wartime Commission Targets Armed Contractorsby Pratap Chatterjee, Special to CorpWatchJune 23rd, 2010This week, almost a decade after the U.S. "War on Terror" began, the Commission on Wartime Contracting held two days of hearings into the role of private contractors in conducting and supporting war. The Congressional witness table included Aegis, DynCorp and Triple Canopy. Curiously, Blackwater was not called; and the CEO of Torres Advanced Enterprise Solutions failed to appear.

ADM's New Frontiers: Palm Oil Deforestation and Child Labor
by Charlie Cray, Special to CorpWatchMay 18th, 2010ADM has moved beyond the days of blatant price-fixing that landed its top execs behind bars. But the company's forays into new global agricultural markets bring charges of complicity in forced child labor and rampant deforestation. Critics assert that the conglomerate's embrace of self- regulation and voluntary guidelines is but a cynical ploy to deter effective reform.

BP: Beyond Petroleum or Beyond Preposterous? (2000)by Kenny BrunoMay 12th, 2010In 2000 British Petroleum launched an expensive ad campaign, re-branding its corporate image into the eco-friendly "BP: Beyond Petroleum.” We said it then. When a company spends more on advertising its environmental friendliness than on environmental actions, that's greenwash.
Three long weeks into the BP oil disaster roiling the Gulf of Mexico, CorpWatch's December 2000 skewering of its new image sadly, bears repeating.

Afghanistan, Inc.: A CorpWatch Investigative Report (2006)by Fariba Nawa, Special to CorpWatchApril 30th, 2010The recent boom in humanitarian aid has an underbelly largely invisible to charity sector outsiders. “Easy money: the great aid scam," packs a biting critique (Linda Polman, The Sunday Times Online, April 25).
In 2006, CorpWatch’s "Afghanistan, Inc.", cited by Polman, drilled down on reconstruction dollars, in what’s become known as “Afghaniscam.” We bring our report to you again.

Afghanistan Spy Contract Goes Sour for Pentagonby Pratap Chatterjee, Special to CorpWatch March 16th, 2010Mike Furlong, a top Pentagon official, is alleged to have hired a company called International Media Ventures to supply information for drone strikes and assassinations in Afghanistan and Pakistan, according to a complaint filed by the CIA and revealed by the New York Times on March 15.

Protesters in Eastern India Battle Against Mining Giant Arcelor Mittalby Moushumi Basu, Special to CorpWatch March 2nd, 2010In the rural, tribal lands of Eastern India, protesters are going head-to-head with world steel giant Arcelor Mittal. “We may give away our lives, but we will not part with an inch of our ancestral land," the villagers cry. "The forest, rivers and land are ours. We don't want factories, steel or iron. Arcelor Mittal Go Back.”

DynCorp Oversight in Afghanistan Faultedby Pratap Chatterjee, Special to CorpWatch February 26th, 2010Afghan police are widely considered corrupt and unable to shoot straight; they die at twice the rate of Afghan soldiers and NATO troops despite $7 billion spent on training and salaries in the last eight years. A new high-level report says that the State Department's contract with DynCorp is at fault.

Asia Inhales While the West Bans the Deadly Carcinogenby Melody Kemp, Special to CorpWatchFebruary 16th, 2010Asbestos, a known carcinogen, causes 100,000 occupational deaths per year. Although banned in much of the world, asbestos is a common and dangerous building block in much of Asia’s development boom, and its export remains both legal and profitable -- to the health detriment of the region.

Agility Attempts to Vault Fraud Chargesby Pratap Chatterjee, Special to CorpWatchFebruary 1st, 2010Agility, a Kuwait-based multi-billion dollar logistics company spawned by the U.S. invasion of Iraq, is facing criminal charges for over-billing the U.S. taxpayer on more than $8.5 billion worth of food supply contracts in the Iraq war zone. If the lawsuit is successful, the company could owe the U.S. government as much as $1 billion.

Shed a Tear for Our Democracyby Robert Weissman, Public CititzenJanuary 22nd, 2010Patronage from Exxon, Goldman Sachs, Pfizer and the rest of the Fortune 500 is already corroding the U.S. policy making process. In Citizens United v. FEC, the U.S. Supreme Court has now ruled that these corporate giants have a First Amendment right to spend unlimited amounts of money to influence election outcomes.

Temping Down Labor Rights: The Manpowerization of Mexicoby Kent Paterson, Special to CorpWatch January 6th, 2010In the globalized electronics production chain, Mexico serves as the main assembler of Asian-produced components for electronics exported to the United States. Mexico's labor force is increasingly supplied by temporary workers employed through domestic and transnational corporations like Manpower.

The Enbridge Oil Sands Gambleby Andrew Nikiforuk, Special to CorpWatch December 14th, 2009Patrick Daniel, the CEO of Enbridge Inc, is bullish about the future of unconventional oil from Canada’s massive tar sand deposits. His company not only operates North America’s longest crude oil and liquid pipelines, but transports 12 percent of the oil that the U.S. imports daily. Canada’s bitumen, or dirty crude, lies under a forest area the size of England and is arguably the world’s last remaining giant oil field.

Bhopal: Generations of Poisonby Nityanand Jayaraman, Special to CorpWatchDecember 2nd, 2009On the night of December 2-3, 1984, the Union Carbide pesticide factory in Bhopal, India leaked poisonous methyl iso cyanate into its densely populated neighborhood, killing 8,000 people in the immediate aftermath. 25 years later, Dow Chemical (which purchased Union Carbide in 2001) still refuses to clean up the site. But a new generation of Bhopal survivors is taking on the fight.

CorpWatch Announces Version 2.0 of the CrocTail Corporate Subsidiaries Database and Open APISpecial to CorpWatch November 24th, 2009Developed with support from the Sunlight Foundation, CrocTail provides an interface for browsing information about several hundred thousand corporations publicly traded in the U.S. and their domestic and foreign subsidiaries. In this new version, users can click on different years and see how subsidiary relationships for a company have changed over time.

Black & Veatch's Tarakhil Power Plant: White Elephant in Kabulby Pratap Chatterjee, Special to CorpWatch November 19th, 2009In a secluded valley a few miles from Kabul's international airport, $285 million in U.S. taxpayer dollars have flowed into a Black & Veatch-built power plant outside Tarakhil village. But, far from the public relations coup the project was intended to supply, the plant has run into problems with planning, cost over-runs and alleged corruption.